How To Be More Confident Without Even Trying!
Its time to look for an easy way to grow more confident in your desires. It starts with having perspective!
It’s a mind-bender to know that you can be more confident with everything you do, without really doing much of anything to achieve it.
That is of course once you set you intentions to
know who you truly are!
You’re All Talk and No Traction!
The book “ Feel the fear and do it anyway ” by Susan Jeffers, is a great example of being afraid and how we can openly accept that our fears are real to us. Feeling fearful can have dominion over our actions and, as Susan Jeffers points out, we can let fear motivate us instead of feeling crippled by it.
That being said, we should realise there is an art to being fearless. It starts by us not giving a damn about judgement or even the outcome of a situation.
It has everything to do with our approach to being in control of a situation, otherwise known as having confidence.
Confidence is a required skill in many aspects of our life. We may not have been born with it or learnt from our parents, although neither is it a subject taught in school.
I certainly would have benefitted from a couple of lessons a week in confidence training.
Society poses many pressures on us of what our lives should look like at a certain age and stage of our lives. We are encouraged to have had a good education, then get a good job and then settle down etc.
These expectations take a lot of decision making and what’s more, it deserves approaching these decisions with confidence.
We have seen in recent years that many aspects of society’s expectations being turned upside down. Our lives no longer have an order of regimented sequences. Having expectations are great in theory but it can be counterproductive and in fact, do more harm than good.
Our lives are full of variables that include making mistakes. We should look deeper at how to use adversity as traction for us getting a grip on how to be more productive.
There are no reasons to seek perfection in a world built for continued learning.
The Perfect Excuse
I struggled with doing things perfectly my entire life.
It was just the way I was wired. My mother never gave me a tough upbringing or any signs of discomfort mentally or physically, but I found that I continually put pressure on myself to be a high achiever.
I expected great results from everything that I did and because I was doing it. If I’m being honest with myself, I expected to be perfect.
Perfection to me was having the confidence that I could do anything I set my mind to do.
I considered myself to be a confident person and we all know that perfection doesn’t exist. I have grown to accept that I don’t need to be perfect and it’s taken me a long time to realise this fact.
In my early 30’s I asked myself these questions.
What does perfection even look like?
What or when has something reached perfection?
I will answer these later.
Illustrated Youth
Since the age of seven, all I did was draw. I loved drawing and designing funny characters with expressions on their faces. I drew unique personalities and I knew that’s all I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
Bringing characters to life made me feel connected and at best, I felt a little different to people that were around me. I used to think that designing characters was so natural that I didn’t identify with the outside world much.
My childhood was spent largely inventing on paper. I didn’t have many if any real friends when I was young, so the ability to breathe life into a character on paper was like a bridge for me to communicate between worlds.
For me drawing was cathartic, and the one thing I was best at doing.
I realised that I didn’t draw because I wanted to, and as weird as this sounds, it’s as if the characters wanted me to give them life.
As I got older, I developed quite a talent for drawing these characters and I used to put them in a portfolio to show them to anyone who cared to see.
Show and Yell!
I remember it was a sunny Saturday afternoon in my mother’s apartment. I was in my late teens and I wanted to show my mother the latest pictures that I had just finished because of course, I valued her opinion.
I went into the front room where she was sitting in her favourite comfy chair while knitting and I said,
“Hey ma, I would do you think?”
As she held the drawing of one of my characters, I began to tell her how I did it and what motivated me to do it.
I told her why I chose the colours and also that I was about to throw it away, as I didn’t think it was as perfect as I could get it.
I also mentioned that I could do a better version.
Then she turned to the next picture. This image was of a boy in a go-kart race car.
I told her that I didn’t like the position of the boy and that I wanted to use a different expression on his face to show his frustration because he didn’t win the race.
She loved it.
Then she turned to the next page and again I explained that this pencil drawing was of a girl with long brown flowing hair and that I wanted to highlight her eyes as she was crying.
To me, the drawing had a haunting beauty to it.
I was shocked when my mother stopped me while I was mid-flow of my explanation, she said,
“Why do you keep doing that to yourself?”.
I looked confused as she spoke in a raspy but concerned tone. I recognised that tone as she had a knack for reducing me to a 5-year-old child before telling me that I had done something wrong.
She continued,
“Why are you telling me about the picture. Stop explaining yourself and just show me. It doesn’t matter what I think.”
All I could hear were crickets and the wind blowing dry bushes across the street: metaphorically speaking.
I didn’t know what to say.
She continued, “You don’t need to explain yourself when showing people your pictures. Just give it to them and let them decide?”
“Well, I was just ….”
“You were just nothing! Do you honestly think in some way by you explaining your reasons why you did it, and how you did it, that you will get them to understand you better”?
“Stop seeking other people’s approval”
Insert shock emoji here.
I couldn’t believe that my mother was in some way criticizing me for simply telling her how I accomplished my artwork.
I gathered my portfolio and I went silent.
I would be the first to admit that I was being a little sensitive, actually a lot sensitive. I didn’t know what to say because in one hand I knew she wasn’t putting me down, she just had enough of me doing that thing where I was making excuses again.
I repeatedly explained myself when it came to my performance of anything I did. There was no bigger critic than myself and, in a way, I was seeking acceptance by explaining my motives.
She went on to say that she knew I was an independent spirit, but when I explained myself its sounded needy which is why it bothered her.
So, why on earth would I feel the need to care what others thought when I didn’t do that at any other time with anything else I did.
It was a hard lesson to hear from my mother but I saw something from that moment on.
Maybe I wasn’t as confident as I thought I was.
Have Faith in Confidence
In addition to loving the world of illustration which, by the way, I went on to carve a career, I was also an avid student of ancient philosophy and psychology.
I love the power of words and how we interpret them to form images in our minds. Our perspective allows us to project those images onto the cinema screen of others, which is how we communicate.
When deciding to write this article it gave me great pleasure to use my studies in etymology (the study of the history of words) to illustrate that words have power in their meaning. To give you a small example of this, let’s look at the word ‘confidence’.
The word confidence has Latin origins from the Latin ‘confidentia’, meaning trust and alliance. It describes having a ‘certainty’ and self-assurance and among other denotations as having ‘the reliance on one’s powers’.
I tried for years to fit in with society and understand why I felt so awkward. I was used to designing characters with strong personalities and secretly I was hiding behind them because I didn’t have self-assurance. In short, I didn’t have confidence.
This apprehended me from doing many things like learning to drive, date and even learning to swim. Swimming was a dream of mine, but I felt fearful of that because I thought I couldn’t be in control and incidentally drown.
It hadn’t dawned on me until I many years later that I was a walking state of irony. I mean here I was, knowing what the etymology of confidence is and yet I wasn’t demonstrating it.
Your Biggest Critic is You!
Let’s face it, we all have made excuses for not achieving something at one time or another in our lives.
Whether it’s a job that you didn’t get or a relationship of any kind that didn’t go to plan, we all find a reason to explain what happened.
Just like I did when I felt the need to explain my pictures to my mother. There was something deeper that I needed to address and quite frankly, I was kidding myself. There I was explaining and justifying everything and yet actually, I was rehearsing what I might say to anyone other than my mother if they asked me about my pictures.
My first battle with imposter syndrome had begun and I didn’t even know it.
I prepared my defence without the confidence that my work could speak for itself.
Moving forward some ten years later from when my mother said those thought-provoking words, I revisited what she said, and it shaped a better view of myself.
As the saying goes, “you can blame everybody but the right body,”
I did a lot of soul-searching and studying what confidence looks like. I worked on my self-esteem by first getting self-acceptance and giving myself permission to be flawed.
It was ok. I was ok.
I knew then that from that moment on to:
Just go create not validate
I didn’t have the illustrious career as an artist like I wanted when I was young and that’s only because I grew to have other passions and even greater desires. That hasn’t stopped me drawing as I still use the power of imagination to draw upon (sorry I couldn’t resist the pun) my knowledge of self-awareness to illustrate a point.
The Universal Detour
I am a firm believer in everything happens for a reason
and it is at this point that I will answer the two questions I posed in the early part of this article.
Just to remind you of the questions asked:
1.What does perfection look like?
Well, simply put. The word perfection has old French origins and by definition means ‘complete’ and ‘nothing more to be accomplished or desired’. However, when dealing with the human experience, the only time when there is anything final attached to it is when it is deceased.
To be alive is giving breath to new concepts and having alternate circumstances. Nothing is static and things are constantly moving, evolving and growing especially over time. This is the nature of…well, nature isn’t it?
So why do we think we should stop growing within ourselves when we experience an uncomfortable situation.
2. What or when has something reached perfection?
You don’t ever reach perfection because it doesn’t exist.
Do you remember when I said I showed my pictures to my mother knowing that I could do a better version?
I was being a perfectionist about it from an egocentric point of view. The time devoted to achieving perfection show continual efforts to resolve something that doesn’t need a perfect resolution.
This is a good lesson for life because it illustrates that the journey of life is far more interesting than reaching the destination, whatever that is.
Final View
I constantly remind people that there is nothing external of our selves. We have the power within us all to solve many things, especially when it comes to seeking our purpose and having direction.
I know that it seems easier said than done, but once we recognise that our own power, also known as having self-awareness, we can then navigate to where to look for
Self-assurance.
But we do not have to look very far.
We are all equipped with a homing beacon and this homing beacon acts like a spiritual guide lighting our way to show us what to do with our experience on earth.
We often ignore the signs that are being shown to us daily, however, when we are ready to answer our calling, our confidence grows.
And why is that, you might ask? Because of the true definition of what it means to have confidence means having ‘unwavering faith’.
Have faith that you are not alone. Faith that no-one is going to judge you, and if they do so what?
Do more and care less about the opinion of others.
You already know in your heart what to do, where to go and what needs to be done. You just need to get on with it.
Even during tough times, trust that you can move forward because you are more resourceful than you give yourself credit.
Again, you know in your heart what you want.
You see, home is where the heart is, and doing that which you feel is your purpose will give you intense confidence, security and self-assurance just like being at home.
All we need to do is, stop trying to be confident and instead allow yourself to be.
